I'm pleased and proud to announce a new joint venture from AccuJazz and ChicagoJazz.com: ChicagoJazz.com Radio. It's an unprecedented radio application that anyone with any bit of interest in Chicago's jazz scene will find useful and interesting.
The "Radio Station" features 10 subchannels, including "Chicago Vocalists," "Chicago Veterans," "Chicago Avant-Garde Jazz," and, probably the coolest, "Chicago Jazz Fest 2009," playing music by the many great artists, local and national, scheduled to perform at this year's fest. Access it by going to ChicagoJazz.com, scrolling down just a bit, and clicking on the banner that says "Listen Now to ChicagoJazz.com Radio." You can get to the subchannels by clicking on the "Other Channels" tab in the player.
Why shine the spotlight on Chicago? Why not New York, New Orleans, or Rolla? The answer is pretty simple: we're from Chicago. Right now I'm sitting in the AccuRadio offices downtown, a few dozen feet away from one of America's most iconic buildings, I play in Chicago's music venues, I frequent the city's jazz clubs, and, truth be told, artists from Chicago have produced an enormous amount of great jazz over the years.
Another question: what's ChicagoJazz.com? It's a pretty coveted URL, for one. It's also the web arm of Chicago Jazz Magazine, a bi-monthly newsprint magazine distributed for free at restaurants, bars, and libraries around Chicago. The website features local jazz news and a huge amount of local musicians' personal websites, like a localized MySpace. It's a great starting place for anyone looking to get familiar with the Chicago scene, and now there's the perfect soundtrack to browsing the site.
You can read my appreciation of the past and present of Chicago Jazz here, in my post about AccuJazz's Regions: Chicago channel. From Louis Armstrong to Johnny Griffin, Joseph Jarman to Kurt Elling, Chicago has incubated its fair 
share of jazz creativity.While the AccuJazz channel has already been out for a little while, ChicagoJazz.com Radio will hopefully expose AccuJazz programming to a new audience, and it lets listeners go deeper into the different strands of Chicago Jazz. For example: there are definitely plenty of Avant-Garde tracks that are on their dedicated channel that didn't quite make the cut for the main Chicago channel. Same goes for the other subchannels. Plus, for those of you in to that sort of thing, there's even a "Chicago Smooth Jazz" channel. It's alright, you can listen. I won't tell anyone.
This looks pretty cool! What a great way to get new, younger music out to more people (wink, wink!). Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely be checking it out!
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